[phyller]

This is a losing argument, the people (many many people) that believe these wars were all about the USA stealing oil and gold will never change their minds, they didn't get that opinion in the first place because they were thinking very logically about it or looking into it. The US having anything other than evil motives is not a possibility to be considered, so everything they do must be explained in a way that shows the US has bad intentions.

I've had these arguments with internationals living, working, and studying in America with Americans and its a dead end.

[redial]

Yes, the US leveled an entire country and has been occupying it for almost 20 years just out of the goodness of their heart, grandma must be so proud, no economic interest whatsoever!

What confuses people like you is that you think selling the oil is the only way the US has to benefit from the war. The US most of all, like all superpowers before it, wants control of the market.

[phyller]

Exactly, you make my point. If somehow you think the US had benefited from this you are crazy. The US didn't pour billions of dollars into Iraq, no one in the region was threatened by a despot with the third largest military in the world, it was just a followup to the amazing economic windfalls of Vietnam and Korea!

[objektif]

I never thought I would see such a comment in HN. I really dont even know where to start disputing your insanely idiotic comments about Vietnam and Iraq wars. We are talking about wars which caused more than 2 million civilian deaths.

You should leave international politics aside and go back to tech or whatever the hell you do in your daily job.

[phyller]

I was being sarcastic. The logic being if the United States would go to war only for economic benefit or control, then that must have also been the case for Vietnam and Korea. Which is, of course, ludicrous.

[adventured]

> the US leveled an entire country

The US didn't level Iraq in fact. The Iraqis leveled Iraq trying to murder each other in a large civil war that the US tried for years to stop (it could have just left instead). The US lost thousands of soldiers and a trillion dollars stepping in-between those factions. The Sunni and Shia in Iraq have hated each other for hundreds of years and immediately began killing each other after Saddam's Government fell. Saddam's 'solution' for that conflict previously was extreme oppression of the majority Shia. The only rational solution is to split the country into pieces; until then the conflict will continue perpetually.

> has been occupying it for almost 20 years

You're inventing that.

The US isn't occupying Iraq and certainly hasn't occupied it for 20 years. The US has single digit thousands of troops in Iraq in mostly supporting roles, at the invitation of the Iraqi Government. It previously left at the request of the Iraqi Government during the Obama Admin.

Please tell me how the US can occupy Iraq with a few thousand soldiers, when it couldn't control Iraq previously with more than a hundred thousand soldiers.

> you think selling the oil is the only way the US has to benefit from the war. The US most of all, like all superpowers before it, wants control of the market.

The US had dramatically more control of the Iraqi oil market before the war, with the ability to raise or lower output at will, using the aggressive sanction regime that was in place against Saddam Hussein's government. If the US wanted more Iraqi oil on the market, all it had to do is relax sanctions or look the other way as countries cheated on the sanctions.

Now Iraqi oil output is heading to new record highs, with the US having very little control over it. In fact, in your theory the US has an incentive to decimate the Iraqi oil industry rather than see it thrive. The US is the world's largest oil producer and has the most to gain from that. Projections are for US oil production to climb to 15-18 million barrels per day, far beyond Saudi and Russia, over the coming decade. It would be a large benefit to US oil producers - keeping prices up - to not have Iraq producing so much oil over that time.

The post Saddam ten year era in Iraq - the occupation - was about nation building, a foolish exercise of a superpower. The same is true about trying to prop up the Afghanistan Government vs the Taliban (a nearly impossible task). The US has vaporized a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, there is no way that can ever be recouped. The US had prior success with nation building in Europe and Asia and ignorantly believed it could accomplish a positive outcome in the Middle East.

[phyller]

My Iraqi friends, particularly one from Mosul, told me that the issue they had was that when Saddam was overthrown the coalition took too little control instead of too much. This created a power vacuum that allowed all sorts of bad actors to terrorize everyone else.

[jki275]

I would agree with one exception -- as bad as the baath party was, disbanding it and removing all its military officers was one of the watershed events that destroyed the coalition's ability to rebuild the country in a stable fashion.